Terence Corcoran: Mike Duffy’s verbal flimflam turned villain into victim in the eyes of the media

What a spectacle this has been: Two veteran media hacks and professional personalities, skilled manipulators of the public mind, suddenly raised to the status of heroic battlers against an evil prime minister. Overnight, Mike Duffy and Pamela Wallin — admitted expense account padders and alleged prevaricators — are elevated to the biggest prime-time roles of their careers, engulfing the government of Canada in a so-called scandal.

Everybody talks about the Conservative voting base. Mike Duffy says the Prime Minister told him he had to pay back his expenses, even if he hadn’t done anything wrong, because “the [Senate housing expense] rules are inexplicable to our base.”

Although Mr. Harper denied saying those words, and instead said he told the whole caucus that they could not claim expenses they did not incur, much of the action in this Shakespearean drama is indeed dictated by what may, or may not, be acceptable to “the base.”

The decision to introduce a motion into the Senate to suspend Mr. Duffy, Pamela Wallin and Patrick Brazeau without pay was made, presumably, on the calculation that it would play well with hardcore Conservatives.

Why did it come to this? When Mike Duffy delivered his post-partum blast at Stephen Harper this week, the last people you would expect to fall for his extravagant accusations would be the media. Throughout his career Mr. Duffy was mostly seen as a partisan lightweight around the Ottawa Press Gallery. Every now and then he’d score a coup, but his main claim to fame was not his dogged journalism so much as his oleaginous populism and special charms as a speaker and TV personality.

But suddenly Mr. Duffy, whom few thought credible 24 hours earlier, became the bearer of truth against power, the man who drew a “sordid portrait of the Harper operation” — as Harper hater Lawrence Martin claimed — and demonstrated a “pattern of behaviour” within the Harper entourage wherein “truth has been taken out to the woodshed on more than a few occasions.”

This, after Mr. Duffy delivered an obviously paranoid fantasy filled with unsubstantiated innuendo and distortions. In a 1,700-word speech scripted and crafted for delivery by a man who is a pro at verbal flimflam, Mr. Duffy dropped his bombshells and context, wallowed in self-deception, portrayed himself as victim of a “monstrous political scheme” — and then left the Senate stage never to be seen since.

Why did anyone accept a word of it? This is a man who spent the past six months in almost total silence. Over that time, he granted no interviews, released no documents, lied about the source of his $90,000 expense repayment, and limited his public comments to mumbling while being followed down the roads leading in and out of Parliament by TV cameras and reporters. But when he appeared in the Senate chamber to unwind his 1,700-word toxic screed, he was taken seriously. Not just seriously, he was raised to the status of potential dragon slayer of the reigning media dragon, Conservative Prime Minister Harper.

One would expect the NDP’s pit-bull leader to ride along on Mr. Duffy’s truckload of scatological material, but the media?

I could run through the list of willfully gullible writers, reporters and TV personalities who took Mr. Duffy’s words at face value and without question. CBC’s The National deserves special mention. “Senator Mike Duffy breaks his silence and draws the prime minister closer to the Senate scandal,” said Peter Mansbridge on Tuesday night. “Five months ago … Mike Duffy said he’d give Canadians his whole story. Today he let loose with it. … It was scathing, jaw dropping, a direct shot at the highest office in the country.”

Later in the show, The National’s At Issue panel — minus the National Post’s Andrew Coyne — weighed in with pontifical judgments on how the Duffy missive was “extremely damaging” and was “lighting a fuse on the bomb that went off today.” Chantal Hebert pointed out that “When the prime minister calls you in his office and has a meeting at the top,” that’s a big deal. “It’s very hard now for Stephen Harper to say ‘I didn’t know what was happening.’ ”

As we now know — and as was known for some time — nothing was happening. Said meeting between Mr. Duffy, Mr. Harper and Nigel Wright did not take place in the PM’s office, except maybe in Mr. Duffy’s fevered recreation of the facts for his own self-serving purposes. Mr. Duffy had accosted the Prime Minister and Mr. Wright following a Tory caucus meeting, at which time Mr. Harper told Mr. Duffy he had to pay back the $90,000 expenses or face expulsion from caucus.

Instead of paying the money back with his own money, Mr. Duffy somehow wangled a $90,000 personal cheque out of Mr. Wright. Eventually the story on this cheque will come out, but there is no evidence or reason to believe the prime minister knew about it.

What the media should have been doing throughout this week is go after Mr. Duffy and ask him for the proof he says he has to support his allegations. Where’s the letter he says he has from Marjory LeBreton, former government leader in the Senate, telling him it’s OK to claim Ottawa living expenses by declaring his primary residence is in Prince Edward Island? It’s a cottage that a Deloitte audit — with which Mr. Duffy refused to co-operate — showed Mr. Duffy stayed in almost exclusively during the months of July, August and September?

Ms. Wallin’s personal plea before the Senate also seems to be full of holes, many of which were highlighted in recent comments by Senator LeBreton.

The media and NDP have had a field day with the Duffy/Wallin takeover of a story in which they are the chief villains, not victims. As time goes on, we may get to this truth, with the prime minister emerging in the public mind as the man of principle, the leader who said the right thing to do was pay back inappropriate expenses.

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